NASA’s primary mission in the 1960s was to go to the moon, but close second were its twin goals of improving the economy of the South and fighting segregation, which President Johnson considered to be inextricably linked. By building space centers in Houston; Huntsville, Ala.; rural Mississippi; and Brevard County, Fla., NASA used its prestige and financial might to challenge the profoundly racist culture of its host communities.

The agency enforced equal opportunity hiring rules (albeit poorly) for its contractors, forbade employees to participate in events at segregated institutions and brought significant numbers of educated workers to the Deep South. The black engineers, scientists, computer programmers, would-be astronauts and other pioneers who desegregated the space program were as courageous as any civil rights marchers, and this is the first time their story has been told in detail.

Under pressure from Johnson, NASA officials seemed to relish pushing for civil rights. James Webb, NASA’s administrator, and Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist (of all people), tangled with George Wallace as they tried to protect their Huntsville base from “the worst segregationist excesses.” As Paul and Moss show in this surprising and insightful history: “A common lament since 1969 has been, ‘If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they . . . ?’ NASA did land men on the moon and in the process made life in the South less segregated.”

HEADSTRONG

52 Women Who Changed Science — and the World

By Rachel Swaby

273 pp. Broadway, paper, $16.

“This book about scientists began with beef stroganoff,” Swaby explains. In 2013, a New York Times obituary mentioned the rocket scientist Yvonne Brill’s stroganoff recipe and the number of her children before getting around to her professional achievements. Outraged, Swaby became inspired to write this valuable collection of brisk biographical sketches of 52 women who made contributions in fields like medicine, genetics and physics. These scientists were brilliant, driven, resistant to criticism and, because few would hire or pay them, often forced to work for nothing.

The seismologist Inge Lehmann discovered that the earth has an inner core. Jane Wright, an African-American doctor, helped develop chemotherapy. Emmy Noether helped invent abstract algebra and create the equations to support Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin worked out the crystal structure of vitamin B12. When she won science’s highest honor, The Daily Mail announced: “Nobel Prize for British Wife.”

Some sketches correct earlier portrayals that emphasized their subjects’ ladylike qualities — for example, Florence Nightingale is presented here not just as a nurturing angel with a lamp, but as a pioneer in statistics.

Swaby tells the scientists’ stories with energy and clarity. Refreshingly, spouses and children are mentioned only when relevant — and the book is recipe-free.

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ADA’S ALGORITHM

How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age

By James Essinger

254 pp. Melville House, $25.95.

In this engrossing biography, Essinger argues that we might have entered the computing age two centuries ago had the contributions of Ada Lovelace been recognized in her time.

The daughter of the dissolute Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke, Lovelace was pushed into mathematics early. Her mother was determined to squelch any Byronic impulses in her only child and to make Lovelace “completely rational,” Essinger writes. Lovelace took to her studies easily, although she irritated her mother with her impulse to seek “playful uses for science and mathematics.”

At the age of 17, she met Charles Babbage, then 44, and thus began one of the great friendships in the history of science. Babbage was an eccentric showman who had invented a machine for making calculations. It was pure steampunk: whirling cogs and gears and cranks. He was envisioning a more elaborate contraption, whose workings would be controlled by a punch-card system. He hadn’t foreseen the implications of his invention — but Lovelace did. In a visionary analysis, she explained that the engine could be applied to any manipulation of information, defining “operation” as we use the term today, and writing the first computer program.

In a letter to Babbage, Lovelace once wrote, “I wish to add my mite towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the most effective use of mankind.” Essinger’s biography reveals how amply she succeeded.

HALF-LIFE

The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy

By Frank Close

378 pp. Basic Books, $29.99.

The five-year disappearance of the brilliant Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo is one of the Cold War’s enduring mysteries, and the subject of this riveting study.

Keeping track of Pontecorvo was never easy. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Pisa, Pontecorvo worked as a researcher with Enrico Fermi, figuring out how to use neutrons to induce radioactivity, before fleeing to Paris to escape ­Fascism. He then fled from Paris to southern France by bicycle as the Nazis invaded the city, and soon left Europe entirely for a job in Oklahoma. The Manhattan Project recruited him in 1943 despite a note of concern from the F.B.I.: An agent had noticed Communist literature on Pontecorvo’s bookshelves. After the war, Pontecorvo joined the nuclear energy program of Britain, becoming a citizen there — and then vanished along with his family in 1950, only to reappear in Moscow five years later.

There’s still no direct evidence Pontecorvo was a spy, but Close suspects that the double agent Kim Philby had alerted Moscow to the F.B.I.’s interest in him, which prompted the Soviets to hustle the scientist into Russia. In any case, Close comes to the inarguable conclusion that he made the wrong bet in the Cold War: “Pontecorvo spent 43 years in Russia, where his scientific career was frustrated, his family was traumatized and his ideals were slowly crushed in the face of Soviet repression. If Pontecorvo was a spy, he was punished more than the ­others.”